Chương 183: Chapter 184: They're After Our Guano

September 2030, Human Hut Mountain"I can't believe they're after our guano," Leo said. Mike looked up.

"I know, right? It's batshit." He paused, seeming to realize what he'd said, then shook his head.

"There are tons of guano in caves everywhere. And who in their right mind would attack our factory? We recently quadrupled production. No one sane would want to go within five miles of that place." Leo sat cross-legged on a flat stone at the edge of Human Hut Mountain. The sun had set an hour ago. Arthur, Mike, Kevin, and Tianyi formed a loose semicircle around him, each reviewing their own copy of Zhang Wei's latest report. The Heavenstone Sect was massing troops to destroy their guano factory.

"Should we even bother fighting them?" Leo set his report down.

"The factory is just mortal materials. Some wooden vats. Maybe a few T1 formations for the kettles. Basically worthless." Tianyi made a sound like Leo had stepped on his foot.

"This matter is not about the guano."

"Then what's it about?"

"Face." Leo waited for more. Tianyi stared at him. He turned to the others, searching for help. Everyone else tried very hard not to meet his eyes.

"The Heavenstone Sect has declared enmity." Tianyi spoke slowly, as if to a child.

"They have distributed posters. They have spoken condemnation in public forums. Now they must follow through."

"I still don't get why you guys are all so obsessed with face." Arthur and Mike glanced at each other and suppressed a laugh. Tianyi's hands clenched at his sides.

"Why does a man care about his dao heart?" His voice started to climb.

"Why does a sword care about its edge? Face is face! It is the measure of a cultivator's standing beneath heaven! To have face is to have weight! To lose face is to become weightless! Insignificant! A cultivator without face is a cultivator without self!" The rant hung in the air. Everyone else exchanged glances. They wondered if their friend needed professional help. Tianyi looked like he wanted to strangle all four of them. He closed his eyes. He breathed.

"Just know that every other cultivator in this world cares very deeply about face." Leo snorted.

"If they care so much about face, why can't they even get my face right?" He reached into his storage ring and pulled out the most recent wanted poster. The poster was terrifying. The man in the portrait was completely bald, his scalp gleaming like a polished stone. An outrageous mustache swept across his upper lip, curling at the ends like demon horns. Below it, a wild beard spilled down his chest in a tangled mass. Bold characters proclaimed: BANDIT KING LEO CHEN, TRAITOR OF THE HUMAN RACE.

Forty miles away, on the outer wall of a market town, Qin Pengfei supervised the placement of posters.

"Higher on the left," he said.

"The Bandit King's eyes must meet the traveler's eyes. Psychological pressure begins with eye contact."

"Brilliant, Young Master Qin!" one of his junior brothers said, hammering the nail higher.

"Utterly brilliant! Eye contact!" Another junior brother, the one holding the paste bucket, studied the finished poster for a long moment.

"Boss," he said carefully.

"Leo Chen doesn't look like that." Pengfei stopped tapping his fan.

"I mean, we met him," the junior brother went on.

"At the factory. He was, you know. Young. Smooth-faced. He looked like a scholar. You said so yourself, you said if not for his reputation you would mistake him for a..."

"And WHAT," Pengfei said, "would you have us do instead?"

"Put up an accurate picture?" Pengfei closed his eyes. He took a few deep breaths.

"You want the Heavenstone Sect, the supreme power of Stonehaven, the unified might of thirty-seven lesser sects, to announce to the entire Azure Profound Continent that we cannot handle a smooth, hairless teenager."

"This one only meant..."

"If we papered the provinces with Leo Chen's actual face, he would not even need to send his Guano Investigators." He spat out the word 'Guano'.

"We would hand him victory without a fight. Every sect under heaven would hear the tale.

'The Heavenstone Sect, brought to its knees by a Foundation Establishment junior too young to sprout chin hair.' We would be ridiculed out of existence."

"As my grandfather says: the truth is what the sect requires it to be." Pengfei snapped the fan open.

"The beard stays. The baldness stays. Bandit King Leo Chen is a fifty-year-old monster who devours organs and consorts with beasts, because the alternative is that he is nineteen, and if he is nineteen, then what are we?" Silence.

"Paste the next one," Pengfei said.

"So what are we actually going to do?" Leo asked.

"Are we going to have to kill people over guano?"

"Yes," Arthur said immediately.

"No," Mike said.

"Arthur, no."

"Kid asked a question, I answered it. Somebody comes for your guano, you put 'em in the ground. That's how we handled claim jumpers in my day." Arthur wanted to try booby-trapping the guano factory. Mike wanted to petition Flockfeather for protection. Kevin proposed relocating the factory underground, remembered what the smell would do in an enclosed space, and withdrew the proposal himself mid-sentence, visibly haunted.

Leo listened to all of it with his chin in his hand, and somewhere around the hour mark he'd had enough. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Okay. Stop. Everyone stop." He sat up.

"I don't care about this stupid face thing. They can smash every guano vat we own. The last thing I want is to fly back to that factory and defend it in person. I nearly lost consciousness the last time I got downwind. Why don't we just use smell-containment formations and make the whole problem disappear?"

"We tried that," Mike said.

"Months ago. When you finally have to release the containment, everything that built up comes out at once. One of the laborers described it as getting punched in the nose by a fist made of ammonia. Plus you have to refresh the T1 qi in the formations constantly. They aren't permanent."

"Fine." Leo threw up his hands.

"Then I'm not fighting over a smelly factory. Let them destroy it. We'll just spread production out. Whose idea was it to put everything in one spot anyway?" Kevin opened his mouth. It had been Leo's idea. Kevin remembered the meeting. Leo had used the phrase "economies of scale," and everyone had nodded along like it made sense. But the poster on the stone said Boss Chen beat his own men, and Kevin decided not to say anything about it.

"Well..." he said instead, "so... Lord Flockfeather explicitly banned new factories. The beasts hate them. They want guano processing nowhere near their lands, and their definition of 'near' is, uh, generous. Every beast clan on the continent is a NIMBY. Nobody wants a guano factory in their backyard, even when the backyard is three thousand square miles." Leo drummed his fingers on his knee. The beasts wouldn't take it. The wilderness wasn't safe.

And Leo couldn't spend every waking hour guarding a clearing in the mountains. He had Cranesong to record, NFL practice every afternoon, and a game against the Commanders in three days.

"Fine. Then we move production into Stonehaven." Silence. Leo leaned back.

"The Heavenstone Sect doesn't want to let us process guano in the wilderness in peace? Okay. Fine. We'll do it on the steps of their sect. Let's see how they like being the ones downwind."

"Have small teams smuggle the raw guano in with the refugee traffic. Process it inside the city under containment formations. When a batch is done, ditch the formation before it saturates, grab the saltpeter, set up somewhere else." Snickers went around the circle. Even Tianyi's mouth twitched.

"One more thing." Leo stood.

"My game against the Washington Commanders is Saturday. Once the regular season begins, I need to focus on Flying Aces. I can't be flying out here every time someone smashes a vat. Vivian's in the middle of negotiating a Coke sponsorship. I need to win some games." He grinned.

"So make sure the bats don't sell guano to anyone. Keep it exclusive, keep it mysterious. As long as the Heavenstone Sect thinks it is the key to everything, they'll focus on the guano instead of harassing my laborers."

Zhang Wei had a bad feeling. It started around midday, when the Heavenstone Sect's inner disciples returned to Stonehaven in triumph. They paraded through the streets with pieces of the guano factory hoisted above their heads. Wooden beams. Iron kettles. Fragments of collection basins still crusted with white residue. Qin Pengfei stood on a platform near the central plaza, accepting the adulation of the crowd.

"Behold!" He gestured dramatically at the debris.

"The so-called headquarters of the Guano Gang! Reduced to rubble! Their vats shattered! Their operations destroyed!" The crowd cheered while holding their noses. Zhang Wei stood at his office window and watched the parade pass. He should have felt relieved. Leo's dispersal order had arrived just in time. The laborers had scattered hours before the attack and destroyed all unprocessed materials. But his bad feeling refused to leave. He spent the next hour trying to pin it down.

The Heavenstone Sect's increased patrols? Predictable, and his people knew the schedules. The applications backlog? Miserable, but familiar misery. The gang leader's newest scheme? Leo had ordered guano processing moved into Stonehaven itself. Small teams would use any available building, process a batch, and relocate before the smell-containment formations ran out of spiritual qi. Any available building. Any available building. Including this one. He was out of his chair before the thought finished.

Up the back stairs two at a time, past a startled clerk, around the corner to the roof access ladder. The smell-containment formations were T1. That was the insidious part. T1 talismans hummed everywhere in a building. Laundry arrays, preservation seals, insect wards, all background noise to his divine sense. Nobody noticed T1 talismans. He burst onto the roof, robes flapping, and skidded to a halt. Six laborers... no... not laborers... brothers... they were called brothers now.

Six brothers looked up from a wooden vat of soaking guano. One of them was mid-stir.

"OUT. Out, out, OUT! This is the headquarters! This is where the money lives! Do you know what happens to a brotherhood whose central office smells of guano! MOVE, all of it, NOW, do not roll the vat down the stairs, CARRY the vat down the stairs..." They moved. Vats, trays, poles, jars, hustled toward the stairwell under Zhang Wei's furious supervision. As they filed past him toward the stairs, one of them paused.

"Underboss." The brother nodded respectfully.

"Perhaps also the basement." Zhang Wei's blood left his face all at once. He ran.

Lord Grayscroll, sect leader of the Heavenstone Sect, was at his wit's end. He sat in his private study, surrounded by reports that all said the same thing: every measure the sect had taken against the Guano Gang had failed. They couldn't cut the Guano Gang's supply lines. There were no suppliers to pressure, no buyers to intimidate. The gang produced their own charcoal, mined their own sulfur, and processed their own guano. Grayscroll still didn't know what guano actually was.

His disciples had tried asking the spiritual bats. The bats had taken extreme offense and demanded to know why humans were so obsessed with their business. They couldn't bully the laborers into quitting. Imperial law was clear on that point. Harassment of civilian workers, even enemy civilian workers, was grounds for Imperial investigation. And if the Embroidered Uniform Guards started poking around the Heavenstone Sect's inner operations... Grayscroll shuddered. He moved on.

The biggest problem was that they couldn't even find Leo Chen. The boy appeared once at the guano factory, terrified Elder Qin's grandson into retreat without lifting a finger, and never showed his face again. He refused to set foot outside Skyhome. He hid behind thousands of cranes like a coward. Whenever the sect tried to invoke Leo's crimes with the Imperial Court, officials looked at the file, saw a nineteen-year-old Foundation Establishment cultivator, and sneered. A knock at the door interrupted his brooding.

The aide's voice came through, hesitant.

"Lord Grayscroll. An imperial official wishes to speak with you." Grayscroll went very still.

"An imperial official."

"Yes, Lord. He claims to represent the Embroidered Uniform Guards. He has presented an identity token and invoked imperial authority." Grayscroll closed his eyes.

"Tell Arthur to go away. I know it's him." The aide hesitated.

"Lord?"

"The old man. Higgins. He's scammed us four times now by flashing his imperial secret police identity tokens." Grayscroll rubbed his temples.

"Confidential inspection fee. Emergency cultivation assessment. Spirit vein regulatory compliance. The Guano Gang has a knack for producing identity tokens that no one can explain." It was true, and it was worse than the aide knew. No one had ever even seen Leo Chen's personal identity token. Gang members refused to produce it in the open. The sect had ambushed couriers. They had searched caravans. In a moment of desperation Grayscroll preferred not to revisit, the sect had shaken down Zhang Wei himself.

Zhang Wei had simply smiled, tossed the token into the air, and sent it to the heavens by some method no formation master could explain. It still had not come down. Four disciples were still stationed at the site with a net. Their weekly reports read, in their entirety, "No change."

"Lord Grayscroll. The official seems... genuine."

"They always seem genuine. That's the point." Grayscroll waved a hand.

"Describe him."

"His face is covered, Lord. But he appears to be Foundation Establishment. Elderly. His demeanor is..." The aide searched for words.

"Shifty."

"Ah." Grayscroll nodded slowly.

"Then it is confirmed. It is Arthur." He decided to teach that old man a lesson.

"Bring down two Gold Core disciples. Beat him thoroughly, but leave no lasting injuries. He is elderly, after all. Confiscate the identity token, remove the mask, and bring him before me on his knees. It is time this office recovered some face." The aide bowed and withdrew. For the first time in weeks, Grayscroll allowed himself a small smile. He arranged his expression. He rehearsed the opening line. Ah, Elder Higgins. The requisition business again?

Some minutes later the doors opened and two Gold Core inner disciples dragged a beaten man across the floor and forced him to kneel. One of them tossed the confiscated identity token onto the floor and ripped the mask away. Grayscroll looked at the man. The old man looked back at him with his one working eye. It was not Arthur.